Asiaweek

» see asiaweek.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 14 December 2001, between 00:51 and 10:49 in the morning, the front page of asiaweek.com went from 12,261 bytes to 1,256. The Internet Archive had been crawling that page almost every day for two months, so the swap is visible to the hour. What replaced the magazine was a small white box holding a search field and a short notice, above a logo file the staff had named closelogo.gif.

Asiaweek was founded in 1975 by Michael O'Neill and T. J. S. George, who had both just left the Far Eastern Economic Review, and it was the English-language newsweekly for the part of the world the Review covered more slowly. Reader's Digest owned most of it until 1985, when Time Inc. bought 84 percent and left O'Neill with the rest. Time removed him in 1994. In twenty-six years the magazine had four editors in total, which for a weekly is an unusual kind of stability, and the last of them was Dorinda Elliott, who came over from Newsweek in October 2000.

The relaunch was in May 2001. Asiaweek repositioned as a business title, circulation 120,000, into a market that already had the Review and the Asian editions of everything else. Then the advertising went. President Peter Brack said a difficult market had been made much worse by the financial fallout from September 11, Time announced the closure on 29 November, and the last issue carried the date of 7 December 2001.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the notice they left up ~

The replacement front page has a link at the top that reads "last home page". It is set in size="1" type colored #FFFFFF on a page whose background is also #FFFFFF, so on a 2001 monitor it was invisible unless you dragged your cursor across it. Somebody on that staff wanted the final edition of the homepage kept and reachable without putting it in front of readers.

The notice itself sits one click away, at closenotice.html, and it opens with the only sentence that matters for dating any of this: "ASIAWEEK ceased publication with its Dec. 7, 2001 issue, but its online archives are still available." Then comes a line that nobody writing about the closure seems to have picked up. "ASIAWEEK was one of the first magazines to go online with its June 19, 1995 issue. Over the years, policies changed, but for most of ASIAWEEK.com's life span, virtually the entire magazine was made available to its online readers." A weekly that gave away nearly all of itself, from 1995, six years before it closed.

Three people signed it. Stephen Cannings and Bob Dietz signed as producer and managing editor of the website. Underneath them Dorinda Elliott signed as editor of the magazine, and the closing line is hers: "It's been a great run, online and in the hard copy edition."

~ the rankings nobody wanted ranked ~

From 1997 Asiaweek published Asia's Best Universities, and it remains the only magazine that ever tried to rank multidisciplinary institutions across the whole region against each other. The academics hated it and the readers loved it, which is the standard result. By the fourth survey the University of Tokyo, number one in the first two, had stopped participating, and so had every Taiwanese university except two. Asiaweek dropped the ranking in July 2001, five months before it closed, with a line about how these institutions do not change much over twelve months.

That ranking is the one piece of Asiaweek that traveled far enough to reach someone like me, and it still did not. Its Asia ran from Karachi to Auckland; Turkey was never in it, and in 2001 I was seventeen and picking a Turkish university off a national exam score with no magazine involved. An English-language newsweekly sold at Hong Kong and Singapore airports was not a thing a dial-up house in Ankara came into contact with.

~ what the box was actually for ~

The tombstone page is not really a tombstone. The search field on it was wired to the live Asiaweek collection, and the sidebar carried year links running back through 1997 and 1996 to 1995, plus a Special Sites directory. For a while after December 2001 the whole twenty-six-year run was still queryable from the front door, and the notice says why: the archive was heavily used by researchers and academics and anyone with an interest in Asian affairs, so they left it switched on.

It did not last. Time kept the domain redirecting into its own Asiaweek paths for another five years, and from December 2006 the archive's record of asiaweek.com is nothing but 301s. Today the domain is a bare 404 over http with nothing answering on https at all. The articles survive mostly on the CNN side of the old partnership, under URLs that still read /ASIANOW/asiaweek/, which is the sort of accident that keeps a magazine readable twenty-five years after its publisher switched the lights off.

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